buttony

adj

1. Having a large number of buttons.

   “That carriage came round to Gillespie Street every day; that buttony boy sprang up and down from the box with Emmy’s and Jos’s visiting-cards […]”

   “1869, W. S. Gilbert, “Bob Polter” in Bab Ballads, p. 179, “And will my whiskers curl so tight? My cheeks grow smug and muttony? My face become so red and white? My coat so blue and buttony?”

   “[…] the inconsistent woman fell upon his buttony breast weeping copiously.”

   “That night I lay on a buttony mildewed company mattress between my favorite sheets.”

2. Resembling a button or buttons.

   “The Stalactical, is generally of a brassy colour; and so is the blistered buttony Ore, which is protuberant in a semi-circular form […]”

   “Tietjens paused and aimed with his hazel stick an immense blow at a tall spike of yellow mullein with its undecided, furry, glaucous leaves and its undecided, buttony, unripe lemon-coloured flowers.”

   “[…] something a little doggish peeped out of the black buttony eyes, a hint of the seraglio.”

   “[…] the street had been widened at the expense of a row of sycamores whose blotched bark and buttony seed pods had seemed oddly toylike to him, as if God were an invisible playmate.”

3. Resembling a button or buttons.

   “But the little dinky, buttony or warty berries must not be packed at all.”

   “Some seasons a large number of berries are buttony.”

4. Resembling a button or buttons.

noun

1. (uncountable)The manufacture of buttons.

   “Whenever we inquired of the village girls what their occupation was, almost invariably the quaint answer ‘We do buttony’ was given.”

   “From this time onwards ‘buttony’, or making buttons, gradually became an important industry at which many people earned their livings.”

   “[…] she busied herself in the front room, rustling about in Anne Kellaway’s box of buttony materials filled with rings of various sizes, chips of sheep horn for the Singletons, a ball of flax for shaping round buttons, bits of linen for covering them, both sharp and blunt needles, and several different colors and thicknesses of thread.”

   “Catastrophically for Dorset buttony, Ashton's buttonmaking machine was invented in 1850 and proudly exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851. As a consequence of this invention, the Dorset cottage industry collapsed virtually overnight […]”

2. (Scotland, uncountable)A children’s game played with buttons.

   “She collected all her treasures, the bottle with the brass top that she had got from Shovel’s old girl, […] the pretty buttons Tommy had won for her at the game of buttony, the witchy marble, […] these and some other precious trifles she made a little bundle of and set off for Double Dykes with them, intending to leave them at the door.”